Terence Davies - IMDb IMDb Terence Davies was born on November 10, 1945 in Liverpool, England. He is a director and writer, known for The House of Mirth (2000), The Deep Blue Sea (2011) and Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). See full bio » Born: The Deep Blue Sea – review | Film | The Guardian The Observer The Deep Blue Sea – review Terence Rattigan's romantic drama set in a repressive postwar Britain is brought to the big screen superbly by Terence Davies Tom Hiddleston and Rachel Weisz in Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea. Saturday 26 November 2011 19.05 EST First published on Saturday 26 November 2011 19.05 EST Share on Messenger Close If we count his first three short films made on shoestring budgets between 1976 and 1983 as a trilogy, and his next, Distant Voices, Still Lives, as a diptych (they were actually made separately), Terence Davies has directed a mere seven films in 35 years.

This puts him in the same exclusive league for low output and high quality as his contemporary, Terrence Malick. Davies's last film, Of Time and the City (2008), was a withering documentary about the sad decline of his hometown, Liverpool, and it followed two feature pictures adapted from American novels set at different times and in different American milieux, John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. His outstanding new movie, The Deep Blue Sea, is a version of a play by Terence Rattigan , who died in 1977 aged 66, Davies's present age. Despite the difference in age and background (Rattigan upper middle class, home counties, Church of England; Davies working class, northern, Catholic), they have much in common: being gay, having a deep attachment to England, a sympathetic understanding of women and a stoical sense of living with and making the uncomplaining best of the hand life has dealt you.

This is perhaps best expressed in Rattigan's plays The Browning Version, Separate Tables and The Deep Blue Sea, all filmed in the 1950s, but none with such love, attention and understanding as Davies brings to his present task. Rattigan's characteristically well-made play, first staged in 1952 with Peggy Ashcroft in the lead, is set on a single day in a dingy bedsit in north London. It begins with an act of despair as Hester, 40ish estranged wife of reserved, 50ish high court judge Sir William Collyer, attempts to commit suicide (a crime in those days) by gassing herself. This action is dictated by the callously offhand behaviour of her lover, the 30ish Freddie Page, a handsome, feckless, sexually vigorous ex-Battle of Britain pilot. The play ends symmetrically beside the same fireplace, but this time the gas is lit – an unforgettably simple gesture, an act of almost heroic resignation. Pinterest Davies has skilfully reworked the play, cutting it up into a number of short scenes, beginning with a quarter of an hour almost without dialogue.

This sequence first creates a lifeless early morning in a 1950 Ladbroke Grove cul-de-sac that looks a lot like the murderer John Christie's killing field at Rillington Place. A montage then establishes the frustrated life of Hester (Rachel Weisz) at home with her unresponsive husband (Simon Russell Beale), her meeting with the dashing Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), their passionate love-making and the writing of the suicide letter, which later falls into Freddie's hands with disastrous consequences. Davies drops conventional chronology to give us moments from Hester's life such as her meetings with the overbearing mother-in-law to whom her husband is in thrall. If Sir William is the deep blue sea of the chilly but kindly British establishment, Freddie, with his passion for sport, his drinking, his devotion to fading military glory, is its devilish other face, the physically fulfilling, misogynistic philistine. There is a gay subtext in Rattigan's play, but it is subtly buried.

Davies leaves it there as he directs us to observe The Deep Blue Sea as a link between Brief Encounter, which appeared just as the second world war ended, and John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which supposedly introduced a new, angry, less repressed Britain in 1956. We now see in Davies's film what might have been, had Celia Johnson's character in Brief Encounter taken off with a Jimmy Porter figure, a self-loathing, insensitive narcissist. Freddie is obsessed, as Porter was, with a romantic notion of the past and the belief that there are, as Jimmy puts it, "no good, brave causes left". Davies elicits outstanding performances from his central triangle, all sympathetic in their various ways, lacking in self-awareness and victims of sorts. Tom Hiddleston, however, has a suggestion of a hidden sensitivity as well as a bitterness that was lacking in the character as created on stage (and later played in the film) by Kenneth More and which made More so much sadder a figure. Davies also brings to the film a particular stylistic trope of his own that he developed in Distant Voices, Still Lives, the drawing together of people into a community through popular music.

In the new film a group sheltering in an underground station during the blitz sing "Molly Malone" (a folk song that echoes Hester's own tragedy); later the drinkers in a packed pub raucously perform the 1952 hit "You Belong to Me", which modulates into Jo Stafford's version as Hester and Freddie dance, slowly and romantically, in the empty art deco foyer of a hotel. This is a magical moment in a movie in which Davies, his cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, production designer James Merifield and costume designer Ruth Myers masochistically capture a key period in British life, a repressed and repressive time. They coat it with the brown varnish of postwar austerity.

David Cox: Cinema colludes with chemistry to turn infatuation into a religion, and this Rattigan adaptation only compounds the problem Published: 28 Nov 2011 Rachel Weisz shines in a melancholy Rattigan adaptation, writes Peter Bradshaw Published: 24 Nov 2011 Terence Davies dives headfirst into a faithful adaptation, but Terence Rattigan's dated play is doomed to sink on the big screen, writes Catherine Shoard Published: 12 Sep 2011 Terence Davies' new film features a bored 1950s wife who leaves her husband after some earth-moving illicit sex. It's how he wishes he'd lived his life, finds Stuart Jeffries Published: 23 Nov 2011 The Deep Blue Sea (2011) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends.

Error The Deep Blue Sea ( 2011 ) R | From $2.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC The wife of a British Judge is caught in a self-destructive love affair with a Royal Air Force pilot. Director: a list of 30 titles created 30 Oct 2011 a list of 40 titles created 24 Dec 2012 a list of 40 titles created 03 Feb 2013 a list of 29 titles created 14 Oct 2013 a list of 23 titles created 03 Aug 2014 Title: The Deep Blue Sea (2011) 6.3/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Nominated for 1 Golden Globe. Another 4 wins & 12 nominations. See more awards » Videos Deep fractures within a family dynamic begin to surface during a getaway to the Isles of Scilly. Director: Joanna Hogg A woman risks losing her chance of happiness with the only man she has ever loved.

Director: Terence Davies A filmmaker looks at the history and transformation of his birthplace, Liverpool, England. Director: Terence Davies A woman in an unhappy relationship takes refuge with a friend's family on holiday in Tuscany. Director: Joanna Hogg Caius Martius Coriolanus is a war hero, banished from his home, seeking to come back. Director: Tim Van Someren The Long Day Closes is the story of eleven-year-old "Bud." A sad and lonely boy, Bud struggles through his days. With cinema as his main source of solace, he haunts the local movie-house. ... See full summary » Director: Terence Davies The second film in Terence Davies's autobiographical series ('Trilogy', 'The Long Day Closes') is an impressionistic view of a working-class family in 1940s and 1950s Liverpool, based on ... See full summary » Director: Terence Davies While on a train, a teenage boy thinks about his life and the flamboyant aunt whose friendship acted as an emotional shield from his troubled family. This film evokes the haunting quality ...

See full summary » Director: Terence Davies The daughter of a Scottish farmer comes of age in the early 1900s. Director: Terence Davies Edit Storyline The wife of a British Judge is caught in a self-destructive love affair with a Royal Air Force pilot. Rated R for a scene of sexuality and nudity | See all certifications » Parents Guide: 25 November 2011 (UK) See more » Also Known As: $123,841 (USA) (23 March 2012) Gross: Did You Know? Trivia TIME magazine ranked Rachel Weisz 's performance in the film as the fourth best performance of 2012 (November 2012), while New York Magazine named it the "Film Performance of the Year" (November 2012). See more » Quotes Freddie Page : Today, the letter, the suicide attempt? We're lethal to each other. You can't expect a bloke to go on after he's driven someone to suicide. Much as he loves her. Hester Collyer : Do you think that leaving me will drive me away from it? Freddie Page : That's a risk we'll both have to take.

Hester Collyer : You're scaring me, Freddie. Freddie Page : It's on the level. I don't enjoy hurting you, I'm not a sadist. But it's on the level. – See all my reviews Had high hopes for a taut intelligent drama - go figure, it features two of my favorite British actors in Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston. Unfortunately, the film fell far short of their talent and my attention. With the excessive and prolonged violin music at the beginning, I knew I had erred in selecting this movie during the Thanksgiving weekend. To its credit, this film did have the look and feel of the 1950's in which it was set. Apart from that, I can't offer up anything else that may have redeemed this torturous series of vignettes of an unhappy woman well-loved by her husband but languishing for a cad who is dying to escape her and all that's dreary in postwar London. Early on, you're probably not dreaming of a happy ending, you're just hoping for an ending -stat! It came alright, just 2 hours too late.

Alas, the downbeat performances, self-destructive characters, and deadly slow pace had me plotting to throw this flick into the sea (or the closest puddle outside)..never to be seen again. 16 of 26 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes The Inner Light of Terence Davies | by J. Hoberman | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books The Inner Light of Terence Davies The Film Desk Leigh McCormack as a movie-loving boy in The Long Day Closes A nation must have its culture heroes, and current wisdom among Anglo-American movie critics and programmers has advanced Terence Davies to the position of Britain’s greatest living filmmaker. The claim may have been made as long ago as The Long Day Closes (1991), Davies’ most autobiographical and fully achieved work, which dramatizes his childhood love of the movies; but consensus coalesced in 2008 with the completion of his documentary-essay about his native Liverpool, Of Time and the City—the filmmaker’s first movie in the eight years since adapting Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.

Beginning this week, viewers in New York will have an unusual chance to assess his work afresh, with the US release of The Deep Blue Sea, his new version of the 1952 Terence Rattigan adultery drama of the same name, coinciding with a retrospective of his work at BAM and a revival of The Long Day Closes at Film Forum. Drawing as it does on the signature play by the post-World War II prince of London’s West End (and one generally regarded as a middlebrow hack even on Broadway), The Deep Blue Sea is the most obviously and provocatively “English” of Davies’ films. But there are, of course, several other possible contenders for British cine-laureate.

These include Ken Loach, the politically-minded director who unexpectedly won the 2006 Palm d’Or at Cannes for his Irish troubles film The Wind That Shakes the Barley; Peter Greenaway, who made several startlingly original early features (The Draughtsman’s Contract and Drowning By Numbers) but has since devolved into a purveyor of post-cinematic claptrap; and Stephen Frears, the prolific workhorse whose movies have racked up a number of Oscar nominations (The Grifters, Dangerous Liaisons, The Queen). Only one, however, is at all credible: Mike Leigh. The Hollywood Interview Mike Leigh in the 1970s Davies and Leigh, who are near contemporaries, have definite points of contact. Radically revising the kitchen sink naturalism that characterized the serious British cinema of the late ’50s and ’60s (Look Back In Anger, A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) both established themselves by showing the downside of British domestic life. Indeed, both grew up in provincial cities (Leigh in greater Manchester, the son of a doctor, and Davies in Liverpool, the youngest of ten children) and both are in some way outsiders.

Leigh is a Jew, Davies is gay; neither man will ever be mistaken for Sirs David Lean or Richard Attenborough. Although the irascible Leigh did accept an OBE in 1993, Davies went out of his way to insult the monarch he calls “Betty Windsor” in Of Time and the City. Their working methods however could hardly be more different. Directed from scripts devised through group improvisation and extensive rehearsals, Leigh’s movies, from his 1988 High Hopes through his most recent Another Year have largely been garrulous, performance-driven ensemble jobs; they tend to rise or fall on the ability of strong characters to personally engage each other in struggle for screen space. Davies’s films, by contrast, are highly crafted, almost solitary endeavors that typically filter everything through personal and/or collective memory. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) is a kind of prenatal memoir, portraying his poor and fractious family in the years immediately preceeding his birth.

Set a dozen years later, in the mid-1950s, the free-associative The Long Day Closes is essentially Davies’s distilled recollection of himself at 11, a seemingly friendless child in a dismal working-class Liverpool, transfixed by his experience of the cinema. Hurricane Films A Liverpool grain barge in Of Time and the City Charged with a love for the ineffable—the movies within the movie are heard but not seen—The Long Day Closes is the autobiography of a sensibility more than a person. (In its hyperrealist clarity, stylized lighting, and frequent rain, it seems the template for something like Wong Kar-Wai’s similarly studied memory film In the Mood for Love.) The purity of Davies’s concentration can make an epiphany of even Debbie Reynolds’s tremulously saccharine rendition of the title song from Tammy. The movie one actually sees is often the play of light on drab walls and worn rugs. With consummate subtlety, Davies suggests Liverpool itself as a sort of sound stage. Leigh has a fondness for cramming movies with comic or grotesque human types.

Some are great: The almost insanely cheerful protagonist of Happy-Go-Lucky, a drop of sunshine who makes Prince Mishkin seem like a misanthrope; the warm-hearted, martyred abortionist Vera Drake; and the angry young vagrant who rants and fucks his way to the end of the night in Naked are larger than the movies that seek to contain them. (On the other hand, the pathetic neediness of the character played by Leslie Manville in Leigh’s Another Year made it all but unwatchable, at least for me.) Sony Pictures Classics GIllian Anderson as Lily Bart in The House of Mirth Davies’s sensitive introversion is the exact opposite. He not only has more compassion for his creatures but the spectacle of their suffering is the subject of the films themselves. With the exception of Of Time and the City, a film that gives full vent to his own bitterness, his post-autobiographical movies have all centered on tragic female protagonists and featuring actress star-turns.

The Neon Bible, a gorgeous but confused adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s precocious first novel, was a loving, if not quite successful, vehicle for Gene Rowlands, the John Cassavetes diva; by contrast, The House of Mirth deployed a limited, over-matched actress (Gillian Anderson of The X Files) in the role of Edith Wharton’s imprudent and naïve Lily Bart with heartbreaking results. Falling somewhere between these two, The Deep Blue Sea presents the beautiful Rachel Weisz as an even more vulnerable protagonist—Hester Collyer, a well-off married woman who has sacrificed the security of her marriage to a paternal, titled magistrate for a dead-end affair with the younger, poorer, less committed former RAF pilot Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston). A less confident Lady Chatterly involved with a more diffident lower class lover, Hester is liberated and apparently destroyed by love. No doubt that, at least in England, much of the excitement around The Deep Blue Sea derives from the movie’s daringly retro, un-ironic celebration of its source material.

(By comparison, Leigh’s only attempt at such wildly square material is his lone period piece, the unlikely and unexpectedly moving Topsy Turvy (2000), which dramatized the collaboration of Gilbert and Sullivan in creating The Mikado.) Music Box Films/Liam Daniel Rachel Weisz as Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea But in another sense, The Deep Blue Sea is pure Davies. It has the bell-jar hermeticism, precise sound, perfectly diffused light of The Long Day Closes; the craft is masterful and so long as Davies sticks to the visual—making a mandala of Hester and Freddie’s entwined bodies as she spirals towards death, or giving Hester her Anna Karenina moment, poised at the edge of an underground platform, hair blown by onrushing train—the movie is near rhapsodic. Davies has no apparent interest in the play’s presumed homosexual subtext (Rattigan, who was gay, had an involvement with a younger man who killed himself) except in so far as Hester is the victim of her own illicit passion.

The opening 10 minutes devoted to her suicide attempt, all but devoid of dialogue and set to Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, is as fine as anything the filmmaker has ever done. Sol Papadopoulos Terence Davies in 2008 Davies’s adaptation is relatively spare; would that he had eliminated Rattigan’s big brittle scenes or cut the ponderously corny dialogue (“I knew in that tiny moment I had no power to resist him”) altogether. Debbie Reynolds is heard but not seen in The Long Day Closes—why does Rachel Weisz need to say things like “It’s sad perhaps, but hardly Sophocles” given the eloquence of her tentative gestures and subtly agonized expressions? Leigh is arguably Britain’s greatest director, but for pure film making, Davies is in another class. The Deep Blue Sea could truly have been a magnificent silent movie. It’s not Britishness that makes Davies a major film artist, it’s his adoration of the medium. March 23, 2012, 1:20 pm Music Box Films Snatches “The Deep Blue Sea” Starring Rachel Weisz For U.S.

| IndieWire Music Box Films Snatches “The Deep Blue Sea” Starring Rachel Weisz For U.S. Music Box Films Snatches "The Deep Blue Sea" Starring Rachel Weisz For U.S. Talk Terence Davies’ “ The Deep Blue Sea ,” starring Rachel Weisz, has been acquired by Music Box Films for U.S. distribution. The drama premiered last week at the Toronto International Film Festival and will close the London Film Festival before opening in the U.K. on November 25. The film marks Music Box’s first English language film buy. The company’s recent slate includes the original Dragon Tattoo trilogy and Francois Ozon’s comedy “Potiche.” In the drama, adapted from the 1952 play by Terence Rattigan, Weisz plays the wife of high court judge who leaves him to move in with a young pilot.

Full release below: MUSIC BOX ACQUIRES US RIGHTS TO TERENCE DAVIES’ THE DEEP BLUE SEA In a deal closed prior to its final public screening in Toronto, Terence Davies’ THE DEEP BLUE SEA, starring Academy Award winner Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardener, The Whistleblower), Olivier Award winner Tom Hiddleston (Spielberg’s War Horse, Thor) and BAFTA and Olivier Award-winning theatre actor Simon Russell Beale (An Ideal Husband, London Assurance), has been acquired by Music Box Films, who have taken US rights from Protagonist Pictures. THE DEEP BLUE SEA is Music Box’s first acquisition of an English language film. In a swift move following the world premiere, they fended off competition from at least three other bidders, and the deal was concluded by Protagonist Pictures CEO Ben Roberts and Music Box’s Managing Director Ed Arentz. Music Box Films’ recent slate includes the original Dragon Tattoo trilogy, which collectively registered nearly $22 million in US theatrical box office receipts.

Ed Arentz commented: “We, and the audience who saw the film at its world premiere screening, were entranced from the opening frames, and by the end there was an inescapable sense that we had witnessed a major work. Timeless and nostalgic, classical and very modern, achingly emotional and serene, it seems a perfect marriage of source material, Terence Davies’ directorial vision and riveting lead performances highlighted by an incandescent Rachel Weisz. We’re thrilled with the opportunity to share this masterpiece with US audiences.” Hot on the heels of the film’s Toronto premiere THE DEEP BLUE SEA screens in competition at San Sebastian, followed by the Closing Night gala at the London Film Festival, prior to its UK release on 25th November 2011 with Artificial Eye. THE DEEP BLUE SEA, adapted from the 1952 play by Terence Rattigan, sees Terence Davies’ return to the big screen. His most recent film, the documentary Of Time And The City, was an affectionate look at his childhood city Liverpool, but he is best known for the semi-autobiographical Distant Voices Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, and the subsequent The House of Mirth.

THE DEEP BLUE SEA is produced by Sean O’Connor, a passionate advocate of Rattigan who worked in the theatre with the play’s original director, and Kate Ogborn (Under The Skin, The Unloved). They commented: “We are genuinely thrilled to be working with Music Box Films on the US release of THE DEEP BLUE SEA. They are the perfect match for us, having an acutely attuned vision for drama of the very highest quality. Their great recent successes speak for themselves and we’re both hugely excited to join forces with such an innovative and passionate distributor.” Rachel Weisz plays the wife of a high court judge who, shockingly in her 1950s milieu, leaves her husband to move in with a dashing young ex-RAF pilot, with whom she has fallen passionately in love. The film explores the nature of love and the lines drawn between love and passion. Tania Seghatchian of the BFI Film Fund said: “We are delighted that THE DEEP BLUE SEA has secured such a swift US distribution deal.

The rapturous response from the Toronto film festival and particularly key US critics has been fantastic and we look forward to Music Box Films ensuring that Terence’s work connects with new audiences and old fans alike.” Katherine Butler of Film4 added: “We are delighted with the wonderful reception THE DEEP BLUE SEA has so deservedly had in Toronto, and are thrilled to be starting a new relationship with Music Box Films. Their palpable passion for, and understanding of, this beautiful film will ensure the audience in the US have the best possible opportunity to experience Terence’s vision”. THE DEEP BLUE SEA is a Camberwell/Fly Film Production financed by UK Film Council and Film4 in association with Protagonist Pictures, Lip Sync Productions and Artificial Eye. Terence Davies: follow your hormones | Film | The Guardian Terence Davies Terence Davies: follow your hormones Terence Davies' new film features a bored 1950s wife who leaves her husband after some earth-moving illicit sex. It's how he wishes he'd lived his life, he says Illicit encounters ...

Rachel Weisz in The Deep Blue Sea Terence Davies Terence Davies: follow your hormones Terence Davies' new film features a bored 1950s wife who leaves her husband after some earth-moving illicit sex. It's how he wishes he'd lived his life, he says Wednesday 23 November 2011 16.30 EST First published on Wednesday 23 November 2011 16.30 EST Share on Messenger Close 'I'm gay, I live alone and I've been celibate for 30 years," says Terence Davies . "So in a sense, I can't imagine what it's like." The 65-year-old director is talking about women trapped in unfulfilling marriages in the 1950s. And yet, in another sense, he perfectly understands their plight – having witnessed, as a boy in the 1950s, his own mother's brutal marriage. "My mum had a terrible life because my father was a complete psychopath," he says. "She never once complained. She got on with it. That's what you did.

It moves me more than I can say." I can't help thinking of the unbearable scene in his autobiographical 1988 film Distant Voices, Still Lives in which the father bawls "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" over the mother's howls as he batters her to the hall floor . "My poor mum," says Davies. "Where do you go with 10 kids? There were no women's refuges. If you had a bad marriage, that was it. Women did not leave their husbands." In his new film The Deep Blue Sea , an adaptation of Terence Rattigan 's 1952 play, Davies explores what happens when a wife does what his mother could not: walks out on a 1950s British marriage. But the real shock of The Deep Blue Sea for Rattigan's original audiences is that Hester (played by Rachel Weisz in the film) does not leave her husband because he's a brute, but for something even more socially unacceptable back then. "At 40, she discovers sex and it absolutely overwhelms her," says Davies.

She's married to what the film-maker calls "a very nice and cultured man", played by Simon Russell Beale in a rare cinematic foray. But he's also sexless and in thrall to his mother. "That combination of love and sexuality makes her say, 'I've got to go with this, I've got to follow my hormones.'" Davies pouts and adds: "If only I'd done that in my life. But let's not go there." He was asked to adapt The Deep Blue Sea by the Rattigan Trust , to mark the centenary of playwright's birth. Rattigan, who was also gay, is rooted in austere postwar Britain and Davies is a master at conjuring up the period. He has made two great films about his Liverpool childhood: Distant Voices in 1988; and its 1992 follow-up, The Long Day Closes . "Because I grew up in the 50s, I know not only what it looked like, but what it felt like. It was drab, but what you had you kept well." Let's not overstate the drabness, though.

His film's palette is dark but sumptuous, like the claret coat Weisz wears throughout. "That would be the only coat that she took when she left her husband. And when you see her in it, it's so full of meaning and warmth and life against a relatively muted background." In fact, Davies makes austerity Britain look so seductively warm you almost want to go back and live there. Almost. Surprisingly, he wasn't familiar with Rattigan's work and familiarity hasn't endeared him to the playwright. "Perhaps it's too reserved," he says. Rattigan's devotees may be alarmed by what Davies has done to the play. He's junked pages of exposition, rewritten lines, refocused characters. Why? "Rattigan wants to explain things all the time, and that's not interesting. Once I decided the drama is from Hester's point of view, that made it easier. We then concentrate on her actions – so instead of being told she has tried to commit suicide, we see it." More radically, he applies his cyclical notion of narrative to Rattigan's linear drama. "The getting there should be more subtle," he says.

"What interests me about cinema is that you have that linear narrative but you move in and out of memory. And memory is cyclical: it prompts other memories. You remember something being funny; you remember some awful crisis." The Deep Blue Sea's love triangle is substantially the same as that in Brief Encounter , David Lean's 1945 film of the Noel Coward play, but with this twist: while Brief Encounter's heroine returned to a dull marriage after her tea-room dalliance, Hester has no direction home. Her decision to follow her hormones proves disastrous. She junks her upholstered marriage after falling for sexy but emotionally immature ex-RAF pilot Freddie. At one point, Hester explains to her husband, a wealthy and sophisticated judge, why she left: "You can't go back to living on the plains after you've discovered something so …" He says: "Primitive?" She replies: "Shall we say natural?" Why did two gay playwrights, Coward and Rattigan, dramatise women's marital frustration? "Perhaps they have a closer sensibility to women.

I don't know if that's true, but I certainly know I feel that closeness, especially to northern women because they're funny." There's also the possibility that The Deep Blue Sea dramatises Rattigan's grief over a lover who killed himself. "All the main characters want a different kind of love. None of them can reciprocate – that's the tragedy." Amazingly, Davies had never heard of Weisz before they worked together and she, to return the compliment, hardly knew his work. "I don't watch much television, but I saw her in Beeban Kidron 's [1997 feature] Swept from the Sea , with her utterly luminous face and beautiful eyes, giving a wonderful performance. I waited for the credits, then rang my agent and said, 'Have you heard of Rachel Weisz?' He said, 'You're the only one who hasn't.' So I sent her the script and she rang me and I said, 'If you say no, I've absolutely no idea who I'll cast.'" Davies channelled the spirit of his dead mother in order to understand all the drama and desire underpinning The Deep Blue Sea. "The great love in my life was my mother.

I always, always, always dreaded her dying. She lived to be 90." He recalls the last time he saw her. "She was staying in a very good council-run nursing home in Liverpool. She'd just had her hair done. I sat with her and she said, 'I love you' and I said, 'I love you'. We didn't say anything else. I just held her hands and I thought, 'This will be the last time I see her alive.' I thought, 'I would give everything I have for her to live.' But then I thought, 'No, that's sheer selfishness.' She was ready to go and my feelings were irrelevant. She wanted to go, I know she did. That was hard." This was in 1997, and the ensuing decade was difficult, both because he struggled to get over her death and because project after project was scuppered, his acclaimed 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth notwithstanding. Only his fond love letter to his native Liverpool, Of Time and the City , emerged from the noughties.

When the Guardian interviewed him in 2006 , he railed against the UK Film Council for nixing one of his films. "What happened after that was they got the right people in the Film Council, people who understand and love film – and then they abolished it! Only in this country." The world's slowest car chase He hopes The Deep Blue Sea is a success, partly so he can get funding for earlier, thwarted projects, including an adaptation of Sunset Song , a glorious evocation of Scottish peasantry and subsistence farming at the time of the first world war, written by Lewis Grassic Gibbon in 1932. He has also been asked by Wyndham's theatre in London to direct Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in 2013. "I could make a pig's ear of it, but I hope I don't because I love the play so much." Time, so often cyclical in Davies's work, is linear in one sense: he isn't getting any younger.

"I'm knocking on, so I can't wait around for work like I used to." He readily concedes, though, that his cinema is a little out of step with the prevailing culture, and that producers may still find it difficult to justify funding him – for all the awards he has amassed during his 35-year directing career. "I don't know why people go to the cinema any more. People don't run around with guns blowing things up in my films. If I did a car chase, it would be two cars going very, very slowly. I was once sent a gangster script and I said, 'What do I know about gangsters? Or drugs?' I took the odd junior aspirin when I wasn't supposed to.

But nothing stronger." David Cox: Cinema colludes with chemistry to turn infatuation into a religion, and this Rattigan adaptation only compounds the problem Published: 28 Nov 2011 Terence Rattigan's romantic drama set in a repressive postwar Britain is brought to the big screen superbly by Terence Davies, writes Philip French Published: 26 Nov 2011 Rachel Weisz shines in a melancholy Rattigan adaptation, writes Peter Bradshaw Published: 24 Nov 2011 Terence Davies dives headfirst into a faithful adaptation, but Terence Rattigan's dated play is doomed to sink on the big screen, writes Catherine Shoard Published: 12 Sep 2011 A Single Consciousness: The Cinema of Terence Davies | Balder and Dash | Roger Ebert A Single Consciousness: The Cinema of Terence Davies by Matt Zoller Seitz Tweet Editors' Note: Liverpool-born filmmaker Terence Davies has carved out one the most distinctively personal bodies of work in cinema. Mostly avoiding traditional storytelling structures, he favors tales that are driven by memory, fantasy and free-association, and that don't look or move like any films before or since.

Michael Koresky, the co-founder of the online film magazine Reverse Shot and the staff writer of the Criterion Collection, has published a new book with the University of Illinois Press that analyzes Davies' themes and style, simply titled Terence Davies . We are pleased to offer an excerpt here. Terence Davies’s cinema has defied easy categorization from the very start. In fact, his first official feature can hardly be termed a feature at all. " The Terence Davies Trilogy ," as it was called when released in 1984, is a compilation of three black-and-white shorts shot on 16mm over the course of seven years—"Children" (1976), "Madonna and Child" (1980), and "Death and Transfiguration" (1983)—all of which evince compositional poise and thematic audacity. The most strongly gay-oriented films of Davies’s career, these were made years before there was anything approaching an alternative queer-cinema movement.

The trilogy’s importance to Davies’s artistic mission is solidified by his choice to further explore its main character, milieu, theme, and tripartite structure in his only novel, "Hallelujah Now" (1983), which similarly delves into its protagonist’s profound guilt and trauma over his homosexuality in an achronological, stream-of-conscious manner that effectively destabilizes the present. With his next two films, Davies continued to excavate his past, breaking up time in even more radical ways.

"Distant Voices, Still Lives" (1988) and "The Long Day Closes" (1992), companion pieces of a sort, and the works on which the director’s reputation largely lies, are woven tapestries of sounds and images, dreams and desires of a specifically working-class milieu that both evoke and fly in the face of the British school of realism that defined Davies’s national cinema, from John Grierson and Humphrey Jennings’s groundbreaking experiments in documentary in the 1930s and 1940s to the “kitchen-sink dramas” of the 1950s and 1960s to the “heritage” and new-realist films of the 1980s and 1990s, typified by Merchant-Ivory and Mike Leigh , respectively. While Davies adheres to a certain verisimilitude in his direction of actors in these films, his stylized cinematography and radical, dreamlike editing helps them dispense with the realism audiences would come to expect.

In their clear move away from these traditions, "Distant Voices, Still Lives" and "The Long Day Closes" captured the attention and admiration of the British film community; their unorthodox aesthetic techniques were acknowledged as evidence of a singular artistic voice, but at the same time, their autobiographical nature led many critics to pigeonhole Davies as a filmmaker interested strictly in his own past, a charge that would prove increasingly false as his career unfolded. "Distant Voices, Still Lives" is aesthetically distinguished by two radical choices that set it dramatically apart from other family-memory films of the era ( John Boorman ’s "Hope and Glory" [1987] is an excellent concurrent example in the United Kingdom; while Ettore Scola ’s "The Family" [1987] and Barry Levinson ’s "Avalon" [1990] make for more sentimental evocations of similar themes of generational loss from other countries, Italy and the United States, respectively.) The first is its expressive camera technique, which is made up of many static tableau-like compositions, punctuated by elegant tracking shots, the combination of which creates a dreamlike space that hangs somewhere between the authentic and the artificial.

This almost constant negotiation of verisimilitude and constructedness heightens the viewer’s sense that he or she is taking part in the filmmaker’s subjective truth, a version of a reality affected by the magnifications and alterations of memory, whether idealized or deprecated. The second way Davies’s film represents a radical move away from traditional forms of fictional narrative is in its use of music. The whole of "Distant Voices, Still Lives" is constructed of seemingly disconnected scenes, threaded together by a complex series of voiceovers, popular songs and religious hymns, and, occasionally, synched dialogue that is used to sound-bridge disparate spaces. The most memorable sounds that bring together the film’s many shards as well as create a more thematic harmony, however, are the popular radio tunes or ditties sung on-camera by its many characters. Entire sequences are made up strictly of these songs, whether performed as solos or singalongs, in the family’s parlor or in the neighborhood pub. Similarly revealing the specters of the director’s haunted childhood via a collage-like conglomeration of memories and pop-cultural references, "The Long Day Closes" brought Davies himself back into the equation.

Front and center is Bud, a dour-faced boy on the verge of a puberty all the more traumatic for the explosion of homosexual desire that comes with it; unlike "Distant Voices, Still Lives", in which the past is a malleable compound made up of the perspectives of multiple characters, this film emanates from a single consciousness. The evolution of Davies’s career up to this point would make one wonder whether fragmented memories were all he was capable of summoning. His next film, though a wild departure in many ways, did not provide easy answers. "The Neon Bible" (1995), adapted from John Kennedy Toole’s slim bildungsroman about a sensitive boy’s coming-of-age in the deep American South, represented a striking change of milieu for Davies, yet many of the director’s already established hallmarks were in full view: taciturn young male protagonist, colorful and more outspoken older relative, the tyrannies of bullies and teachers, the comfort of movies, the birth of religious skepticism. If this alien landscape introduced a new (and probably healthy) awkwardness in Davies’s filmmaking, it also resulted in a singular hybrid of Davies’s poetic British lyricism and stoic American gothic.

Davies’s long, steady tracking shots and unbroken single takes register as dissociated and surreal when reconfigured into a Georgia-shot tale that features one character’s dramatic descent into madness and another’s violent, climactic killing. The Neon Bible met with a cool response from critics and audiences; his next project brought him further from the well-trod territory of the memory film, and fully into the warm embrace of the cinematic community. " The House of Mirth " (2000), his pristine and chilling adaptation of Edith Wharton ’s first novel, set in a viperous, upper-class, turn-of-the-century New York City, features his most atypical subject matter thus far. "The House of Mirth" is an undeniable, elegant triumph in terms of storytelling, performance, and imagery. Yet the film’s sheen of decorum masks what is essentially a horror movie, albeit one in which words are swiftly and efficiently used as deadly weapons, and in which the moral righteousness of its tragic heroine accelerates her downfall.

By the time he made The House of Mirth, Davies was so known for these experiments in memory that, as he said, “I wanted to prove that I could write a linear narrative in which you seed things that pay off.” Not only is the film’s narrative told in a linear fashion, it moves forward with a scary inexorability, one scene following another with brutally gradual momentum. As in Davies’s childhood films, there seems to be an almost constant fear (of being rejected, of being found out) simmering beneath "The House of Mirth". Whereas "The House of Mirth" is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Wharton’s book, in which most noticeable alterations (the amalgamation of two supporting characters for dramatic economy, the excising of a small climactic scene) were ultimately slight, "The Deep Blue Sea" is a dramatic rethinking of Terence Rattigan ’s play, maintaining its basic structural through-line but using it as a foundation for experiments in cinematic time and memory.

That "The Deep Blue Sea" diverges so much from the original Rattigan text is particularly surprising in light of the fact that the project was developed with funding from the Sir Terence Rattigan Charitable Trust on the occasion of the playwright’s centenary. Yet with carte blanche from producers to take liberties in his adaptation (“The Rattigan Trust told me after I’d done a tentative first draft, ‘Be radical!’ So I was,” he told Geoff Andrew in Sight & Sound), Davies made a film that could be called a re-imagining of the source text. " The Deep Blue Sea " is thus wholly unorthodox as a tribute, yet in its fidelity to both Rattigan’s spirit and to Davies’s integrity (the director found much in the original play either implausible or uncinematic), it is perhaps the most expressive and cohesive film based on a Rattigan play. Furthermore, Davies’s artistic sensibilities accentuate the implicit queerness in the original work; when paired with 'The House of Mirth'’s Lily, 'The Deep Blue Sea'’s Hester seems all the more fascinating as a source of queer identification.

Before he made "The Deep Blue Sea," Davies embarked on a film that is singular in his oeuvre while at the same time furthers many ideas present in his other works. "Of Time and the City" (2008), Davies’s single nonfiction film as well as his only one partially shot and edited on digital video, was made as part of a micro-budget initiative called Digital Departures. Commissioned as a work of historical documentary for the city of Liverpool (the initiative was partly backed by the Liverpool Culture Company), Davies’s film, unsurprisingly, turned out to be something far more personal—and critical—than a simple tribute; instead he created a patchwork of intimate revelations and reminiscences that are crosshatched with a wider historical and sociopolitical interrogation of Liverpool, from the 1950s of his childhood to the city as it stands in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Davies’s take on Liverpool is subjective—it’s an untenable place of the mind that exists even more vividly in his recollections than in the preexisting stock footage that makes up most of the film’s visuals.

"Of Time and the City" is bracing in its rejection of several common documentary practices, eschewing impersonal third-person narration in favor of Davies’s own poignant tones (alternately honeyed and barbed-tongued) and refusing to contextualize or identify much of what we see via onscreen text or more direct voice-over. Thus even Davies’s seemingly simple pocket-sized tribute to the hometown of his lost childhood becomes a highly complex, unorthodox work of nonfiction, in which one man’s experience of his city’s changing landscape is inextricable from the shame he felt over his own sexual coming-of-age or the joy he receives from recalling certain songs or movies—in other words, Davies’s sense memory here becomes the memory of Liverpool. Davies’s relatively small output for such a long career is not by choice (for contrast, look at another filmmaker who’s worked in the same basic stretch of years as Davies, the more commercial filmmaker Neil Jordan , who managed to direct seventeen features between 1982 and 2012).

Funding for Davies’s films has been difficult to raise, and the director has been notoriously outspoken on the subject, never shying away from denouncing the state of the contemporary British film industry following the government’s destruction of the British Film Institute Production Board (“Now if a young filmmaker wants to use cinema as a form of expression and an art form, where do they go? How do they get it off the ground?” he asked in a 2006 interview with The Guardian) and bemoaning his outsider status within it. The eight years between "The House of Mirth" and "Of Time and the City" constituted Davies’s most prolonged, sharply felt absence from the film scene, even though "Mirth"’s major critical and commercial success seemed to indicate that new doors would open for him. Instead, one project after another fell through, including a romantic comedy titled "Mad about the Boy" and adaptations of the books "Sunset Song" by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (which Davies hoped would be heading into preproduction at the time of this writing) and "He Who Hesitates" by Ed McBain.

Unlike "The Trilogy," "Distant Voices, Still Lives," "The Long Day Closes," "The Neon Bible," and "The House of Mirth," all of which were projects he shepherded from the outset, "The Deep Blue Sea" and "Of Time and the City" were suggested to him by others. This ultimately doesn’t make them any less personal, but it does give us a sense of the difficulties Davies has had in getting his own projects made and how important it has been in the current state of the industry, so focused on the box-office bottom line, for him to take advantage of such opportunities. That Davies continues to have these sorts of struggles is perhaps in keeping with an artist who prevails despite, or indeed because of, emotional setbacks. “Without all that suffering, there wouldn’t have been any films,” he said in a 1992 interview. The beauty that emerges from such pain reveals a method of re-appropriating the past that we might call “queer” in the way it reconstitutes shards of Davies’s cultural and familial detritus into new forms.

That his art is empowering in its expression of sexual and social difference and at the same time stuck in a mode one could associate with victimization helps define the central contradictions that fuel Davies’s cinema. From Terence Davies by Michael Koresky. Copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press. TSPDT - Terence Davies TSPDT Terence Davies “Terence Davies is one of the most distinctive talents to have emerged from British cinema in the last thirty years.

His approach to film-making is the cinematic equivalent of literature’s magic realism, in which a vivid recreation of the everyday world is fused with dreams and memories to produce a form of hyper-realism, reflecting both the external world and inner world of the film-maker.” - Robert Shail (British Film Directors: A Critical Guide, 2007) Terence Davies Key Production Country: UK Key Genres: Drama, Period Film, Family Drama, Romantic Drama, Psychological Drama, Documentary Key Collaborators: Olivia Stewart (Producer), William Diver (Editor), Roy Boulter (Producer), Sol Papadopoulos (Producer), Michael Coulter (Cinematographer), William Diver (Cinematographer), David Charap (Editor), Christopher Hobbs (Production Designer) "Arguably the most important British filmmaker of his generation, Terence Davies is a poet of the cinema, at once austere and passionate... Davies developed a process dependent on meticulously designed shots, tableau-like evocations of memory linked by emotional (and musical) association more than narrative chronology...

Although the 1950s childhood evoked in both Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes is in many ways painful and even harrowing, the films transcend social realism and self-pity in their distilled stylization, their loving recreation of time and space, and moments of intense communal joy (often involving song, cinema, or even slapstick comedy). Their combination of art-film style and reverence for working-class popular culture is unique in British cinema." - Tom Charity (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007) "British director best known for painful - and painstaking - portraits of childhood. Davies' own harrowing experiences at the hands of an abusive father colour and infuse all his portraits of a working-class Britain.

Nonetheless, these are flavoursome, if slow - sometimes to the point of inertia - nostalgia pieces; their atmosphere is 100 per cent redolent of Davies' upbringing in a disease-ridden Liverpool slum area, the youngest of ten children." - David Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999) "He shows a passionate concern with film craft, lamenting what he sees as the British instinct to use film as a medium for recorded theatre; primarily verbal, sentimental, and in the tight bodice of traditional narrative. His films are remarkably effective in disturbing, collective memories - and myths - of British cultural life with such cinematic ingenuity." - Saul Frampton (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998) "Made on low budgets provided by institutional resources, the films of Terence Davies reveal a highly original, audacious film-maker. Few contemporary figures match his ability or his interest in charting the dark recesses and haunts of the soul; fewer still do with such sincerity and compassion.

Indeed, he is that rarity: a British, but never parochial, director who views cinema seriously and passionately, thus fulfilling the loftiest demands of art." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989) “He initially worked as an actor and novelist before joining the National Film School, where he made an extraordinary trio of short films that lyrically reflected the agony and the ecstasy of his life as a gay man and a Catholic. His best films have included fragments of autobiography, and he has also proved a sensitive director of literary adaptations.” - Chambers Film Factfinder, 2006 "Davies is an utterly personal lyric filmmaker who moves as swiftly as music from the lacerating to the ecstatic… It must be a large question where Davies goes beyond autobiography. But The Long Day Closes is a triumph of common experience.

The Neon Bible seemed to me an enterprising failure, based on a novel by John Kennedy Toole, but The House of Mirth was a great film (dreadfully missed by public and critics alike) in which a thorough sense of literary values was driven home by Davies’s rare capacity for naked feelings.“ - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2010) “Davies’ celebration of the working-class community and the enduring ‘mam’ has been criticised for its sentimentalising nostalgia, but has been defended as a highly formalised and self-reflexive exploration of male memory.” - John Caughie (Encyclopedia of European Cinema, 1995) "I make films to come to terms with my family history...

If there had been no suffering, there would have been no films." - Terence Davies TSPDT Guide Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) ★ , The Long Day Closes (1992) ★ , The House of Mirth (2000) ❖ Recommended The Terence Davies Trilogy (1984), The Neon Bible (1995), Of Time and the City (2008) ❖ , The Deep Blue Sea (2011) ❖ Worth a Look ★ 1,000 Greatest Films ❖ 21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films See Also Ingmar Bergman , Robert Bresson , Jane Campion , Bill Douglas , Victor Erice , Peter Greenaway , James Ivory , Neil Jordan , David Lean , Mike Leigh , Vincente Minnelli , Lynne Ramsay .

Terence Davies / Favourite Films Great Expectations (1946) David Lean , The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950) Frank Launder , Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) Robert Hamer , Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) Max Ophüls , The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) Orson Welles , The Night of the Hunter (1955) Charles Laughton , The Searchers (1956) John Ford , Singin' in the Rain (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly , Victim (1961) Basil Dearden , Young at Heart (1954) Gordon Douglas . Source: Sight & Sound (2012)

Question: Which Liverpool film maker made 'Of Time And The City' and 'Deep Blue Sea'?
Answer: TERENCE DAVIES